Reduce Integration Complexity Between Campus IT Systems
Undoing years of historical integrations and updating to newer, more flexible middleware patterns takes a concerted effort—as well as up to 25% more investment, in time and dollars, at the beginning of a change in strategy.
While IT can define best practices, desired integration end states, and a roadmap to drive change, achieving progress relies on collaboration and investment from business units during technology implementation projects. Inaction is complicity in spiraling campus costs—and CIOs must be the bearer of that message to their peers.
CIOs must make the integration imperative and its associated costs clear to campus leaders and institutional boards through focusing on the latent value of technology synthesis and middleware investments. Tack-on systems, shadow storage, and point-to-point integration architecture all create long-term campus costs in risk, maintenance, and opportunity.
IT leaders must make these costs real for their campus, illustrating the danger of outages, spiraling maintenance costs, and poor ability to leverage technology systems’ data for decision making as pressing concerns at their institution.
Decades of ad-hoc investments and unique technology portfolios mean every campus middleware situation is different. Universities and colleges have varying governance structures, architectures, integration tooling, and staffing levels which all contribute to their ability to change their integration processes.
We identified hallmarks of high-maturity institutions, noting the elevation of middleware to a strategic priority as the greatest indicator of improvement. Fill out the brief diagnostic to find your institution’s areas of focus among ten different hallmarks of success.
Due to limited resources, integration is a means to an end for most IT organizations; whether onboarding a new system or application, engineering a new system interface, or developing dashboards for campus leadership, integration is often the byproduct of other campus needs.
Application developers and maintenance groups focus on their systems of expertise, and each project is completed to deliver business partners’ demands as quickly as possible—often with limited regard to longer term needs and future capabilities. But with ongoing technology value increasingly derived from connecting existing tools and data together for synthesis, CIOs must transform the culture of their organization, pivoting integration from a cost-center activity to a value-driving investment.
CIOs must create internal alignment around the issue of integration, pulling in IT staff with application development, infrastructure, and identity management expertise to create a coherent methodology to address legacy middleware. For larger institutions, a competency center approach can serve all of campus; for smaller schools, a brown-bag approach may suffice to reorient problem solving from projects to long-term integration needs.
Once assembled, groups focused on integration should work to standardize processes, protocols, and tooling. Review the implementation Roadmap, Equipping IT for Integration at Scale, to learn more.
Beyond establishing data feeds for new systems when requested, CIOs and their teams often have limited awareness of the ways that business units use technology and data. While CIOs know that much of the same data is used by different groups across campus, lack of visibility into existing data movement prevents the creation of cross-campus services.
CIOs and their teams should work with campus to consolidate feeds for shared data assets, maximizing the value of IT’s investment in integration, and improving the institution’s data agility.
CIOs must work closely with frontline data users to identify and capitalize on data assets that carry value across the institution. First, CIOs and their teams must work to understand the architecture currently in place by working closely with stakeholders to document current practices and data movements. Shared data assets are good areas of focus for consolidation and shared integration service.
Then, to leverage centralized data assets at scale, IT must look to create data objects with wide-reaching applicability. Iterative data rollouts and consolidated data access points ensure widespread end-user adoption. To learn more, access the executive brief, Creating Resuable Data Service for Campus.
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